Teaser Tuesday // Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover?: 100 Fresh Takes on Familiar Sayings and Quotations

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by Jen at Books and A Beat. Anyone can play along! All you have to do is grab the book you’re currently reading, open to a random page and share two sentences from that page. But make sure you don’t share any spoilers!

As you may or may not have noticed, it’s been f o r e v e r since I posted something. And by f o r e v e r I mean two weeks. I’ve been busy in real life and prioritising stuff I don’t like much, but that’s life I guess. I have been reading loads still (always time for that on the train) and I thought I’d share some teaser sentences from one of my current reads.

I made a spur of the moment decision to go see the philosopher Julian Baggini at the Sydney Writer’s Festival and I’m really glad I did (even though listening to/talking about philosophy first thing on a Sunday morning is a bit muddling for the brain). I picked up a couple of his books afterwards and got them signed, and I had a chat to him without making a complete fool of myself which was nice. For the last few weeks I’ve been dipping in and out of his book, Should You Judge This Book by Its Cover?: 100 Fresh Takes on Familiar Sayings and Quotations.

Basically it’s Baggini looking at familiar sayings and their origins, and applying them to modern times. It’s interesting to see how some sayings have been completely bastardised (like many things) and how completely irrelevant some of them are these days. Yet we persist with them. It’s been a fun book to read and one that is great for reading in little bits, as each saying only has two pages dedicated to it and there’s no plot to follow; so you can put it down for a couple of weeks and pick it up again with no troubles. I highly recommend it. Now here are the sentences:

“Reading feeds the mind as food does the body. Which means that it can do so well or badly, depending on whether what you ingest is nourishing or junk.”

Ah, I can’t say that I really remember any that well. But there were 100 of them, making it near impossible to remember any individual sayings.
I think having so many disadvantaged the book, as it felt like some of the sayings could have been explored a bit more. The “exploration” of each saying is limited to two pages each, so there’s probably a lot missing. I think 50 might have been better with a more in depth look at their origins and usage.
It’s still a good and interesting book, and I know you read philosophy so you’d probably enjoy it. It just could have been better.

I began reading your teaser and thought “Baggini . . . Baggini . . . Now why is that name familiar?” It took me longer than I care to admit to realize he’s the author of my own Teaser this week, The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten!.

I’m excited for you meeting him; out of curiosity, what books did you pick up?

Hahaha – what a coincidence! I’m going to go check out your Teaser now as I had picked up that book to buy, but then went with Should You Judge This Book, and Freedom Regained. It’s the book I actually went to hear him talk about and is basically about the idea of free will and whether we truly have it. I’m very excited to read it.

That’s so exciting! Is she enjoying it?
I don’t think I ever ended up finishing that book, let alone the series. I remember borrowing it from the library in primary school and starting it, but thinking that it wasn’t as good as the BBC adaptation so I never finished it. Little me clearly had no clue about anything.